I recently had an interesting question from a follower of the Twitter question “What would you say is the safest, Firefox or IE?”. This question has not already been asked, but in light of recent events a lot deeper than it seems on the surface.

I work with (and play with, actually), many people who are fans of alternate operating systems, including the natural response to any question that includes the choice between Microsoft and anything else is not always choose Microsoft. We need to explore is also based on merit and not brand.

Microsoft Internet Explorer has been the king of browsers on the Internet for 10 years or more now. Despite its market dominance has decreased slightly in recent times, it still holds an advantage.

Microsoft has also had a difficult start as regards the security of IE, but worked hard to improve and made great progress. A Benefit brings to the table now is the ability to manage centrally through Group Policy objects, and the center of updates via Windows Update and WSUS.

Patch Tuesday is popular and can be regarded as one of the benefits of predictable and updates the planning process can be designed around a. The downside is that sometimes wait a month or more for a solution (like IE exploit being targeted as indicated by SophosLabs).

ActiveX has also been a major concern for the manager and controls are necessary in a business environment, however, allows users to install and update ActiveX controls give third parties the ability to run malicious code on computers of users.

latest story is the introduction Microsoft Internet Explorer 8. While IE8 is more docile than any previous version, it still lags behind Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Internet Explorer 8 makes major improvements to the design and safety awareness of interoperability.

Mozilla Firefox, on the other hand has a different set of issues to be addressed. It is more difficult to centrally manage IE, and has no predictable pattern to upgrade version.

By default Mozilla Firefox to check for updates, but requires the user to accept the update. It must have sufficient privileges to apply the update, and can not be behind a SSL proxy that can interfere with your signing certificate.

Firefox is open source means that defects are discovered frequently by the public and developers, and patches are quick on the heels of new vulnerabilities.

openness also means that Firefox has a great security suite available as NoScript extensions that are able to protect against attacks and kidnappings click JavaScript and other technologies to exploit the browser.

Recently, Firefox has faced new challenges from Google, Microsoft and others in the security field of the browser and the Mozilla team seems ready for the challenge of maintaining security compliance of Firefox.

Search the national database vulnerability Firefox bugs medium high score since January 2009 reported the results of 56 people (some of which have more than one fault).

Microsoft has reported 34 for the same period, with the same score as many statistics have multiple problems in individual counseling.

The most interesting part that seems to divide the source enterprise software giant open source Firefox is conducted to determine the method used to inform the public.

The vulnerability in Firefox’s JIT compiler has been discovered by a developer of Firefox and the result of a mistake that was made public last Thursday (July 10, 2009). The Firefox community has discussed the opportunity for the virus to be released to the public which led to its operation, the following Monday.

In addition, the Register published an article suggesting that Microsoft was aware of the failure of the last more than a year before making a disclosure and a patch over one mistake.

There is no clear answer to which the browser is more secure, the only conclusion to a security expert can reach is that web browsing is still a potentially hazardous activity. I hope this information provides more data to help you make an informed decision.